Tuesday, December 16. 2014

If the brain is a collection
of electrical signals, then, if you could catalog all those those
signals digitally, you might be able upload your brain into a computer, thus achieving digital immortality.

While the plausibility—and ethics—of this upload for humans can be debated, some people are forging ahead in the field of whole-brain emulation. There are massive efforts to map the connectome—all the connections in
the brain—and to understand how we think. Simulating brains could lead
us to better robots and artificial intelligence, but the first steps
need to be simple.

So, one group of scientists started with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a critter whose genes and simple nervous system we know intimately.

The OpenWorm project
has mapped the connections between the worm’s 302 neurons and simulated
them in software. (The project’s ultimate goal is to completely
simulate C. elegans as a virtual organism.) Recently, they put that software program in a simple Lego robot.

The worm’s body parts and neural networks now have
LegoBot equivalents: The worm’s nose neurons were replaced by a sonar
sensor on the robot. The motor neurons running down both sides of the
worm now correspond to motors on the left and right of the robot, explains Lucy Black for I Programmer. She writes:

---

It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation
of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior
touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly.
Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward.

---

Timothy Busbice, a founder for the OpenWorm project, posted a video of the Lego-Worm-Bot stopping and backing:

The simulation isn’t
exact—the program has some simplifications on the thresholds needed to
trigger a "neuron" firing, for example. But the behavior is impressive
considering that no instructions were programmed into this robot. All it
has is a network of connections mimicking those in the brain of a
worm.

Of course, the goal of uploading our brains assumes that we aren’t alreadyliving in a computer simulation.
Hear out the logic: Technologically advanced civilizations will
eventually make simulations that are indistinguishable from reality. If
that can happen, odds are it has. And if it has, there are probably
billions of simulations making their own simulations. Work out that
math, and "the odds are nearly infinity to one that we are all living in
a computer simulation," writes Ed Grabianowski for io9.

Wednesday, June 18. 2014

Next week at the World Cup, a
paralyzed volunteer from the Association for Assistance to Disabled
Children will walk onto the field and open the tournament with a
ceremonial kick. This modern miracle is made possible by a robotic
exoskeleton that will move the user's limbs, taking commands directly
from his or her thoughts.

This demonstration is the debut of the Walk Again Project,
a consortium of more than 150 scientists and engineers from around the
globe who have come together to show off recent advances in the field of
brain machine interfaces, or BMI. The paralyzed person inside will be
wearing an electroencephalographic (EEG) headset that records brainwave
activity. A backpack computer will translate those electrical signals
into commands the exoskeleton can understand. As the robotic frame
moves, it also sends its own signals back to the body, restoring not
just the ability to walk, but the sensation as well.

Just how well the wearer will walk and kick are uncertain. The project has been criticized by other neuroscientists as an exploitative spectacle that uses the disabled to promote research which may not be the best path
for restoring health to paralyzed patients. And just weeks before the
project is set to debut on television to hundreds of millions of fans,
it still hasn’t been tested outdoors and awaits some final pieces and
construction. It's not even clear which of the eight people from the
study will be the one inside the suit.

The point of the project is not
to show finished research, however, or sell a particular technology.
The Walk Again Project is meant primarily to inspire. It's a
demonstration that we’re on the threshold of achieving science fiction:
technologies that will allow humans to truly step into the cyborg era.

It’s only taken a little over two centuries to get there.

The past

Scientists have been studying
the way electricity interacts with our biology since 1780, when Luigi
Galvani made the legs of a dead frog dance by zapping them with a spark,
but the modern history behind the technology that allows our brains to
talk directly to machines goes back to the 1950s and John Lilly. He
implanted several hundred electrodes into different parts of a monkey’s
brain and used these implants to apply shocks, causing different body
parts to move. A decade later in 1963, professor Jose Delgado of Yale
tested this theory again like a true Spaniard, stepping into the ring to
face a charging bull, which he stopped in its tracks with a zap to the brain.

In 1969, professor Eberhard Fetz was able to isolate and record the
firing of a single neuron onto a microelectrode he had implanted into
the brain of a monkey. Fetz learned that primates could actually tune
their brain activity to better interact with the implanted machine. He
rewarded them with banana pellets every time they triggered the
microelectrode, and the primates quickly improved in their ability to
activate this specific section of their brain. This was a critical
observation, demonstrating brain’s unique plasticity, its ability to
create fresh pathways to fit a new language.

Today, BMI research has
advanced to not only record the neurons firing in primates’ brains, but
to understand what actions the firing of those neurons represent. "I
spend my life chasing the storms that emanate from the hundreds of
billions of cells that inhabit our brains," explained Miguel Nicolelis, PhD, one of the founders of Center for Neuroengineering
at Duke University and the driving force behind the Walk Again Project.
"What we want to do is listen to these brain symphonies and try to
extract them from the messages they carry."

Nicolelis and his colleagues at
Duke were able to record brain activity and match it to actions. From
there they could translate that brain activity into instructions a
computer could understand. Beginning in the year 2000, Nicolelis and
his colleagues at Duke made a series of breakthroughs. In the most well
known, they implanted a monkey with an array of microelectrodes that
could record the firing of clusters of neurons in different parts of the
brain. The monkey stood on a treadmill and began to walk. On the other
side of the planet, a robot in Japan received the signal emanating from
the primate’s brain and began to walk.

Primates
in the Duke lab learned to control robotic arms using only their
thoughts. And like in the early experiments done by Fetz, the primates
showed a striking ability to improve the control of these new limbs.
"The brain is a remarkable instrument," says professor Craig Henriquez,
who helped to found the Duke lab. "It has the ability to rewire itself,
to create new connections. That’s what gives the BMI paradigm its power.
You are not limited just by what you can physically engineer, because
the brain evolves to better suit the interface."

The present

After his success with
primates, Nicolelis was eager to apply the advances in BMI to people.
But there were some big challenges in the transition from lab animals to
human patients, namely that many people weren’t willing to undergo
invasive brain surgery for the purposes of clinical research. "There is
an open question of whether you need to have implants to get really fine
grained control," says Henriquez. The Walk Again Project hopes to
answer that question, at least partially. While it is based on research
in animals that required surgery, it will be using only external EEG
headsets to gather brain activity.

The fact that these patients
were paralyzed presented another challenge. Unlike the lab monkeys, who
could move their own arms and observe how the robot arm moved in
response, these participants can’t move their legs, or for many, really
remember the subconscious thought process that takes place when you want
to travel by putting one foot in front of the other. The first step was
building up the pathways in the brain that would send mental commands
to the BMI to restore locomotion.

To train the patients in this
new way of thinking about movement, researchers turned to virtual
reality. Each subject was given an EEG headset and an Oculus Rift.
Inside the head-mounted display, the subjects saw a virtual avatar of
themselves from the waist down. When they thought about walking, the
avatar legs walked, and this helped the brain to build new connections
geared towards controlling the exoskeleton. "We also simulate the
stadium, and the roar of the crowd," says Regis Kopper, who runs Duke’s
VR lab. "To help them prepare for the stress of the big day."

Once
the VR training had established a baseline for sending commands to the
legs, there was a second hurdle. Much of walking happens at the level of
reflex, and without the peripheral nervous system that helps people
balance, coordinate, and adjust to the terrain, walking can be a very
challenging task. That’s why even the most advanced robots have trouble navigating stairs
or narrow hallways that would seem simple to humans. If the patients
were going to successfully walk or kick a ball, it wasn’t enough that
they be able to move the exoskeleton’s legs — they had to feel them as
well.

The breakthrough was a special
shirt with vibrating pads on its forearm. As the robot walked, the
contact of its heel and toe on the ground made corresponding sensations
occur along parts of the right and left arms. "The brain essentially
remapped one part of the body onto another," says Henriquez. "This
restored what we call proprioception, the spacial awareness humans need
for walking."

In recent weeks all eight of
the test subjects have successfully walked using the exoskeleton, with
one completing an astonishing 132 steps. The plan is to have the
volunteer who works best with the exoskeleton perform the opening kick.
But the success of the very public demonstration is still up in the air.
The suit hasn’t been completely finished and it has yet to be tested in
an outdoor environment. The group won't confirm who exactly will be
wearing the suit. Nicolelis, for his part, isn’t worried. Asked when he
thought the entire apparatus would be ready, he replied: "Thirty minutes
before."

The future

The Walk Again project may be
the most high-profile example of BMI, but there have been a string of
breakthrough applications in recent years. A patient at the University of Pittsburgh
achieved unprecedented levels of fine motor control with a robotic arm
controlled by brain activity. The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
introduced the world’s first mind controlled prosthetic leg. For now the use of advanced BMI technologies is largely confined to academic and medical research, but some projects, like DARPA’s Deka arm,
have received FDA approval and are beginning to move into the real
world. As it improves in capability and comes down in cost, BMI may
open the door to a world of human enhancement that would see people
merging with machines, not to restore lost capabilities, but to augment
their own abilities with cyborg power-ups.

"From the standpoint of
defense, we have a lot of good reasons to do it," says Alan Rudolph, a
former DARPA scientist and Walk Again Project member. Rudolph, for
example, worked on the Big Dog,
and says BMI may allow human pilots to control mechanical units with
their minds, giving them the ability to navigate uncertain or dynamic
terrain in a way that has so far been impossible while keeping soldiers
out of harms way. Our thoughts might control a robot on the surface of
Mars or a microsurgical bot navigating the inside of the human body.

There is a subculture of DIY biohackers and grinders
who are eager to begin adopting cyborg technology and who are willing,
at least in theory, to amputate functional limbs if it’s possible to
replace them with stronger, more functional, mechanical ones. "I know
what the limits of the human body are like," says Tim Sarver, a member
of the Pittsburgh biohacker collective Grindhouse Wetwares. "Once you’ve
seen the capabilities of a 5000psi hydraulic system, it’s no
comparison."

For now, this sci-fi vision
all starts with a single kick on the World Cup pitch, but our inevitable
cyborg future is indeed coming. A recent demonstration
at the University of Washington enabled one person’s thoughts to
control the movements of another person’s body — a brain-to-brain
interface — and it holds the key to BMI’s most promising potential
application. "In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain
waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will
maneuver large and small robots, control airships from afar," wrote
Nicolelis. "And perhaps even allow for the sharing of thoughts and
sensations with one individual to another."

Wednesday, April 16. 2014

Qualcomm is getting high on 64-bit chips with its fastest ever
Snapdragon processor, which will render 4K video, support LTE Advanced
and could run the 64-bit Android OS.

The new Snapdragon 810 is the company’s “highest performing” mobile chip
for smartphones and tablets, Qualcomm said in a statement. Mobile
devices with the 64-bit chip will ship in the first half of next year,
and be faster and more power-efficient. Snapdragon chips are used in
handsets with Android and Windows Phone operating systems, which are not
available in 64-bit form yet.

The Snapdragon 810 is loaded with the latest communication and graphics
technologies from Qualcomm. The graphics processor can render 4K (3840 x
2160 pixel) video at 30 frames per second, and 1080p video at 120
frames per second. The chip also has an integrated modem that supports
LTE and its successor, LTE-Advanced, which is emerging.

The 810 also is among the first mobile chips to support the latest
low-power LPDDR4 memory, which will allow programs to run faster while
consuming less power. This will be beneficial, especially for tablets,
as 64-bit chips allow mobile devices to have more than 4GB of memory,
which is the limit on current 32-bit chips.

The layout of the Snapdragon 810 chip. (Click to enlarge.)

The quad-core chip has a mix of high-power ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores for
demanding tasks and low-power A53 CPU cores for mundane tasks like
taking calls, messaging and MP3 playback. The multiple cores ensure more
power-efficient use of the chip, which helps extend battery life of
mobile devices.

The company also introduced a Snapdragon 808 six-core 64-bit chip. The
chips will be among the first made using the latest 20-nanometer
manufacturing process, which is an advance from the 28-nm process used
to make Snapdragon chips today.

Qualcomm now has to wait for Google to release a 64-bit version of
Android for ARM-based mobile devices. Intel has already shown mobile
devices running 64-bit Android with its Merrifield chip, but most mobile
products today run on ARM processors. Qualcomm licenses Snapdragon
processor architecture and designs from ARM.

Work for 64-bit Android is already underway,
and applications like the Chrome browser are already being developed
for the OS. Google has not officially commented on when 64-bit Android
would be released, but industry observers believe it could be announced at the Google I/O conference in late June.

Qualcomm spokesman Jon Carvill declined to comment on support for 64-bit
Android. But the chips are “further evidence of our commitment to
deliver top-to-bottom mobile 64-bit leadership across product tiers for
our customers,” Carvill said in an email.

Qualcomm’s chips are used in some of the world’s top smartphones, and
will appear in Samsung’s Galaxy S5. A Qualcomm executive in October last year called
Apple’s A7, the world’s first 64-bit mobile chip, a “marketing
gimmick,” but the company has moved on and now has five 64-bit chips
coming to medium-priced and premium smartphones and tablets. But no
64-bit Android smartphones are available yet, and Apple has a headstart
and remains the only company selling a 64-bit smartphone with its iPhone
5S.

The 810 supports HDMI 1.4 for 4K video output, and the Adreno 430
graphics processor is 30 percent faster on graphics performance and 20
percent more power efficient than the older Adreno 420 GPU. The graphics
processor will support 55-megapixel sensors, Qualcomm said. Other chip
features include 802.11ac Wi-Fi with built-in technology for faster
wireless data transfers, Bluetooth 4.1 and a processing core for
location services.

The six-core Snapdragon 808 is a notch down on performance compared to
the 810, and also has fewer features. The 808 supports LTE-Advanced, but
can support displays with up to 2560 x 1600 pixels. It will support
LPDDR3 memory. The chip has two Cortex-A57 CPUs and four Cortex-A53
cores.

The chips will ship out to device makers for testing in the second half of this year.

Friday, May 17. 2013

Equinix’s data center in
Secaucus is highly coveted space for financial traders, given its
proximity to the servers that move trades for Wall Street.

The trophy high-rises on Madison, Park and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan
have long commanded the top prices in the country for commercial real
estate, with yearly leases approaching $150 a square foot. So it is
quite a Gotham-size comedown that businesses are now paying rents four
times that in low, bland buildings across the Hudson River in New
Jersey.

Why pay $600 or more a square foot at unglamorous addresses like
Weehawken, Secaucus and Mahwah? The answer is still location, location,
location — but of a very different sort.

Companies are paying top dollar to lease space there in buildings called
data centers, the anonymous warrens where more and more of the world’s
commerce is transacted, all of which has added up to a tremendous boon
for the business of data centers themselves.

The centers provide huge banks of remote computer storage, and the
enormous amounts of electrical power and ultrafast fiber optic links
that they demand.

Prices are particularly steep in northern New Jersey because it is also
where data centers house the digital guts of the New York Stock Exchange
and other markets. Bankers and high-frequency traders are vying to have
their computers, or servers, as close as possible to those markets.
Shorter distances make for quicker trades, and microseconds can mean
millions of dollars made or lost.

When the centers opened in the 1990s as quaintly termed “Internet
hotels,” the tenants paid for space to plug in their servers with a
proviso that electricity would be available. As computing power has
soared, so has the need for power, turning that relationship on its
head: electrical capacity is often the central element of lease
agreements, and space is secondary.

A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a
purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by
reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising
questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power
utility.

Even though a single data center can deliver enough electricity to power
a medium-size town, regulators have granted the industry some of the
financial benefits accorded the real estate business and imposed none of
the restrictions placed on the profits of power companies.

Some of the biggest data center companies have won or are seeking
Internal Revenue Service approval to organize themselves as real estate
investment trusts, allowing them to eliminate most corporate taxes. At
the same time, the companies have not drawn the scrutiny of utility
regulators, who normally set prices for delivery of the power to
residences and businesses.

While companies have widely different lease structures, with prices
ranging from under $200 to more than $1,000 a square foot, the
industry’s performance on Wall Street has been remarkable. Digital Realty Trust,
the first major data center company to organize as a real estate trust,
has delivered a return of more than 700 percent since its initial
public offering in 2004, according to an analysis by Green Street
Advisors.

The stock price of another leading company, Equinix,
which owns one of the prime northern New Jersey complexes and is
seeking to become a real estate trust, more than doubled last year to
over $200.

“Their business has grown incredibly rapidly,” said John Stewart, a
senior analyst at Green Street. “They arrived at the scene right as
demand for data storage and growth of the Internet were exploding.”

Push for Leasing

While many businesses own their own data centers — from stacks of
servers jammed into a back office to major stand-alone facilities — the
growing sophistication, cost and power needs of the systems are driving
companies into leased spaces at a breakneck pace.

The New York metro market now has the most rentable square footage in
the nation, at 3.2 million square feet, according to a recent report by
451 Research, an industry consulting firm. It is followed by the
Washington and Northern Virginia area, and then by San Francisco and
Silicon Valley.

A major orthopedics practice in Atlanta illustrates how crucial these data centers have become.

With 21 clinics scattered around Atlanta, Resurgens Orthopaedics
has some 900 employees, including 170 surgeons, therapists and other
caregivers who treat everything from fractured spines to plantar
fasciitis. But its technological engine sits in a roughly
250-square-foot cage within a gigantic building that was once a Sears
distribution warehouse and is now a data center operated by Quality
Technology Services.

Eight or nine racks of servers process and store every digital medical
image, physician’s schedule and patient billing record at Resurgens,
said Bradley Dick, chief information officer at the company. Traffic on
the clinics’ 1,600 telephones is routed through the same servers, Mr.
Dick said.

“That is our business,” Mr. Dick said. “If those systems are down, it’s going to be a bad day.”

The center steadily burns 25 million to 32 million watts, said Brian
Johnston, the chief technology officer for Quality Technology. That is
roughly the amount needed to power 15,000 homes, according to the
Electric Power Research Institute.

Mr. Dick said that 75 percent of Resurgens’s lease was directly related
to power — essentially for access to about 30 power sockets. He declined
to cite a specific dollar amount, but two brokers familiar with the
operation said that Resurgens was probably paying a rate of about $600
per square foot a year, which would mean it is paying over $100,000 a
year simply to plug its servers into those jacks.

While lease arrangements are often written in the language of real
estate,“these are power deals, essentially,” said Scott Stein, senior
vice president of the data center solutions group at Cassidy Turley, a
commercial real estate firm. “These are about getting power for your
servers.”

One key to the profit reaped by some data centers is how they sell
access to power. Troy Tazbaz, a data center design engineer at Oracle
who previously worked at Equinix and elsewhere in the industry, said
that behind the flat monthly rate for a socket was a lucrative
calculation. Tenants contract for access to more electricity than they
actually wind up needing. But many data centers charge tenants as if
they were using all of that capacity — in other words, full price for
power that is available but not consumed.

Since tenants on average tend to contract for around twice the power
they need, Mr. Tazbaz said, those data centers can effectively charge
double what they are paying for that power. Generally, the sale or
resale of power is subject to a welter of regulations and price
controls. For regulated utilities, the average “return on equity” — a
rough parallel to profit margins — was 9.25 percent to 9.7 percent for
2010 through 2012, said Lillian Federico, president of Regulatory
Research Associates, a division of SNL Energy.

Regulators Unaware

But the capacity pricing by data centers, which emerged in interviews
with engineers and others in the industry as well as an examination of
corporate documents, appears not to have registered with utility
regulators.

Interviews with regulators in several states revealed widespread lack of
understanding about the amount of electricity used by data centers or
how they profit by selling access to power.

Bernie Neenan, a former utility official now at the Electric Power
Research Institute, said that an industry operating outside the reach of
utility regulators and making profits by reselling access to
electricity would be a troubling precedent. Utility regulations “are
trying to avoid a landslide” of other businesses doing the same.

Some data center companies, including Digital Realty Trust and DuPont
Fabros Technology, charge tenants for the actual amount of electricity
consumed and then add a fee calculated on capacity or square footage.
Those deals, often for larger tenants, usually wind up with lower
effective prices per square foot.

Regardless of the pricing model, Chris Crosby, chief executive of the
Dallas-based Compass Datacenters, said that since data centers also
provided protection from surges and power failures with backup
generators, they could not be viewed as utilities. That backup equipment
“is why people pay for our business,” Mr. Crosby said.

Melissa Neumann, a spokeswoman for Equinix, said that in the company’s
leases, “power, cooling and space are very interrelated.” She added,
“It’s simply not accurate to look at power in isolation.”

Ms. Neumann and officials at the other companies said their practices
could not be construed as reselling electrical power at a profit and
that data centers strictly respected all utility codes. Alex Veytsel,
chief strategy officer at RampRate, which advises companies on data
center, network and support services, said tenants were beginning to
resist flat-rate pricing for access to sockets.

“I think market awareness is getting better,” Mr. Veytsel said. “And
certainly there are a lot of people who know they are in a bad
situation.”

The Equinix Story

The soaring business of data centers is exemplified by Equinix.
Founded in the late 1990s, it survived what Jason Starr, director of
investor relations, called a “near death experience” when the Internet
bubble burst. Then it began its stunning rise.

Equinix’s giant data center in Secaucus is mostly dark except for lights
flashing on servers stacked on black racks enclosed in cages. For all
its eerie solitude, it is some of the most coveted space on the planet
for financial traders. A few miles north, in an unmarked building on a
street corner in Mahwah, sit the servers that move trades on the New
York Stock Exchange; an almost equal distance to the south, in Carteret,
are Nasdaq’s servers.

The data center’s attraction for tenants is a matter of physics: data,
which is transmitted as light pulses through fiber optic cables, can
travel no faster than about a foot every billionth of a second. So being
close to so many markets lets traders operate with little time lag.

As Mr. Starr said: “We’re beachfront property.”

Standing before a bank of servers, Mr. Starr explained that they
belonged to one of the lesser-known exchanges located in the Secaucus
data center. Multicolored fiber-optic cables drop from an overhead track
into the cage, which allows servers of traders and other financial
players elsewhere on the floor to monitor and react nearly
instantaneously to the exchange. It all creates a dense and unthinkably
fast ecosystem of postmodern finance.

Quoting some lyrics by Soul Asylum, Mr. Starr said, “Nothing attracts a
crowd like a crowd.” By any measure, Equinix has attracted quite a
crowd. With more than 90 facilities, it is the top data center leasing
company in the world, according to 451 Research. Last year, it reported
revenue of $1.9 billion and $145 million in profits.

But the ability to expand, according to the company’s financial filings,
is partly dependent on fulfilling the growing demands for electricity.
The company’s most recent annual report said that “customers are
consuming an increasing amount of power per cabinet,” its term for data
center space. It also noted that given the increase in electrical use
and the age of some of its centers, “the current demand for power may
exceed the designed electrical capacity in these centers.”

To enhance its business, Equinix has announced plans to restructure
itself as a real estate investment trust, or REIT, which, after
substantial transition costs, would eventually save the company more
than $100 million in taxes annually, according to Colby Synesael, an
analyst at Cowen & Company, an investment banking firm.

Congress created REITs in the early 1960s, modeling them on mutual
funds, to open real estate investments to ordinary investors, said
Timothy M. Toy, a New York lawyer who has written about the history of
the trusts. Real estate companies organized as investment trusts avoid
corporate taxes by paying out most of their income as dividends to
investors.

Equinix is seeking a so-called private letter ruling from the I.R.S. to
restructure itself, a move that has drawn criticism from tax watchdogs.

“This is an incredible example of how tax avoidance has become a major business strategy,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense,
a nonpartisan budget watchdog. The I.R.S., she said, “is letting people
broaden these definitions in a way that they kind of create the image
of a loophole.”

Equinix, some analysts say, is further from the definition of a real
estate trust than other data center companies operating as trusts, like
Digital Realty Trust. As many as 80 of its 97 data centers are in
buildings it leases, Equinix said. The company then, in effect, sublets
the buildings to numerous tenants.

Even so, Mr. Synesael said the I.R.S. has been inclined to view
recurring revenue like lease payments as “good REIT income.”

Ms. Neumann, the Equinix spokeswoman, said, “The REIT framework is
designed to apply to real estate broadly, whether owned or leased.” She
added that converting to a real estate trust “offers tax efficiencies
and disciplined returns to shareholders while also allowing us to
preserve growth characteristics of Equinix and create significant
shareholder value.”

Thursday, May 02. 2013

We’ve been hearing a lot about Google‘s
self-driving car lately, and we’re all probably wanting to know how
exactly the search giant is able to construct such a thing and drive
itself without hitting anything or anyone. A new photo has surfaced that
demonstrates what Google’s self-driving vehicles see while they’re out
on the town, and it looks rather frightening.

The image was tweeted
by Idealab founder Bill Gross, along with a claim that the self-driving
car collects almost 1GB of data every second (yes, every second). This
data includes imagery of the cars surroundings in order to effectively
and safely navigate roads. The image shows that the car sees its
surroundings through an infrared-like camera sensor, and it even can
pick out people walking on the sidewalk.

Of course, 1GB of data every second isn’t too surprising when you
consider that the car has to get a 360-degree image of its surroundings
at all times. The image we see above even distinguishes different
objects by color and shape. For instance, pedestrians are in bright
green, cars are shaped like boxes, and the road is in dark blue.

However, we’re not sure where this photo came from, so it could
simply be a rendering of someone’s idea of what Google’s self-driving
car sees. Either way, Google says that we could see self-driving cars
make their way to public roads in the next five years or so, which actually isn’t that far off, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is even interested in developing self-driving cars as well. However, they certainly don’t come without their problems, and we’re guessing that the first batch of self-driving cars probably won’t be in 100% tip-top shape.

Tuesday, December 11. 2012

IBM has
developed a light-based data transfer system delivering more
than 25Gbps per channel, opening the door to chip-dense slabs of
processing power that could speed up server performance, the internet,
and more. The company’s research into silicon integrated nanophotonics addresses
concerns that interconnects between increasingly powerful computers,
such as mainframe servers, are unable to keep up with the speeds of the
computers themselves. Instead of copper or even optical cables, IBM
envisages on-chip optical routing, where light blasts data between
dense, multi-layer computing hubs.

“This future 3D-integated chip consists of several layers
connected with each other with very dense and small pitch interlayer
vias. The lower layer is a processor itself with many hundreds of
individual cores. Memory layer (or layers) are bonded on top to provide
fast access to local caches. On top of the stack is the Photonic layer
with many thousands of individual optical devices (modulators,
detectors, switches) as well as analogue electrical circuits
(amplifiers, drivers, latches, etc.). The key role of a photonic layer
is not only to provide point-to-point broad bandwidth optical link
between different cores and/or the off-chip traffic, but also to route
this traffic with an array of nanophotonic switches. Hence it is named
Intra-chip optical network (ICON)” IBM

Optical interconnects are increasingly being used to link different
server nodes, but by bringing the individual nodes into a single stack
the delays involved in communication could be pared back even further.
Off-chip optical communications would also be supported, to link the
data-rich hubs together.

Although the photonics system would be considerably faster than
existing links – it supports multiplexing, joining multiple 25Gbps+
connections into one cable thanks to light wavelength splitting – IBM
says it would also be cheaper thanks to straightforward manufacturing
integration:

“By adding a few processing modules into a
high-performance 90nm CMOS fabrication line, a variety of silicon
nanophotonics components such as wavelength division multiplexers (WDM),
modulators, and detectors are integrated side-by-side with a CMOS
electrical circuitry. As a result, single-chip optical communications
transceivers can be manufactured in a conventional semiconductor
foundry, providing significant cost reduction over traditional
approaches” IBM

Technologies like the co-developed Thunderbolt from Intel
and Apple have promised affordable light-based computing connections,
but so far rely on more traditional copper-based links with optical
versions further down the line. IBM says its system is “primed for
commercial development” though warns it may take a few years before
products could actually go on sale.

Friday, November 16. 2012

Spoiler alert: a reoccurring cast member bids farewell in the latest James Bond flick. When the production of Skyfall
called for the complete decimation of a classic 1960s era Aston Martin
DB5, filmmakers opted for something a little more lifelike than computer
graphics. The movie studio contracted the services of Augsburg-based 3D
printing company Voxeljet to make replicas of the vintage ride.
Skipping over the residential-friendly MakerBot Replicator,
the company used a beastly industrial VX4000 3D printer to craft three
1:3 scale models of the car with a plot to blow them to smithereens. The
18 piece miniatures were shipped off to Propshop Modelmakers in London
to be assembled, painted, chromed and outfitted with fake bullet holes.
The final product was used in the film during a high-octane action
sequence, which resulted in the meticulously crafted prop receiving a
Wile E. Coyote-like sendoff. Now, rest easy knowing that no real Aston
Martins were harmed during the making of this film. Head past the break
to get a look at a completed model prior to its untimely demise.

Wednesday, October 24. 2012

What happens when you combine advances
in 3D printing with biosynthesis and molecular construction?
Eventually, it might just lead to printers that can manufacture vaccines
and other drugs from scratch: email your doc, download some medicine,
print it out and you're cured.

This concept (which is surely being worked on as we speak) comes from Craig Venter, whose idea of synthesizing DNA on Mars
we posted about last week. You may remember a mention of the
possibility of synthesizing Martian DNA back here on Earth, too: Venter
says that we can do that simply by having the spacecraft email us
genetic information on whatever it finds on Mars, and then recreate it
in a lab by mixing together nucleotides in just the right way. This sort
of thing has already essentially been done by Ventner, who created the world's first synthetic life form back in 2010.

Vetner's idea is to do away with complex, expensive and centralized
vaccine production and instead just develop one single machine that can
"print" drugs by carefully combining nucleotides, sugars, amino acids,
and whatever else is needed while u wait. Technology like this would
mean that vaccines could be produced locally, on demand, simply by
emailing the appropriate instructions to your closes drug printer.
Pharmacies would no longer consists of shelves upon shelves of different
pills, but could instead be kiosks with printers inside them.
Ultimately, this could even be something you do at home.

While the benefits to technology like this are obvious, the risks are
equally obvious. I mean, you'd basically be introducing the Internet
directly into your body. Just ingest that for a second and think about
everything that it implies. Viruses. LOLcats. Rule 34. Yeah, you know
what, maybe I'll just stick with modern American healthcare and making
ritual sacrifices to heathen gods, at least one of which will probably
be effective.

Monday, October 15. 2012

Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

Thursday, September 20. 2012

The iPhone 5 is the latest smartphone to hop on-board the LTE (Long Term Evolution)
bandwagon, and for good reason: The mobile broadband standard is fast,
flexible, and designed for the future. Yet LTE is still a young
technology, full of growing pains. Here’s an overview of where it came
from, where it is now, and where it might go from here.

The evolution of ‘Long Term Evolution’

LTE is a mobile broadband standard developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project),
a group that has developed all GSM standards since 1999. (Though GSM
and CDMA—the network Verizon and Sprint use in the United States—were at
one time close competitors, GSM has emerged as the dominant worldwide
mobile standard.)

Cell networks began as analog, circuit-switched systems nearly identical
in function to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which
placed a finite limit on calls regardless of how many people were
speaking on a line at one time.

The second-generation, GPRS,
added data (at dial-up modem speed). GPRS led to EDGE, and then 3G,
which treated both voice and data as bits passing simultaneously over
the same network (allowing you to surf the web and talk on the phone at
the same time).

GSM-evolved 3G (which brought faster speeds) started with UMTS, and then
accelerated into faster and faster variants of 3G, 3G+, and “4G”
networks (HSPA, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, and DC-HSPA).

Until now, the term “evolution” meant that no new standard broke or
failed to work with the older ones. GSM, GPRS, UMTS, and so on all work
simultaneously over the same frequency bands: They’re intercompatible,
which made it easier for carriers to roll them out without losing
customers on older equipment. But these networks were being held back by
compatibility.

That’s where LTE comes in. The “long term” part means: “Hey, it’s time
to make a big, big change that will break things for the better.”

LTE needs its own space, man

LTE has “evolved” beyond 3G networks by incorporating new radio
technology and adopting new spectrum. It allows much higher speeds than
GSM-compatible standards through better encoding and wider channels.
(It’s more “spectrally efficient,” in the jargon.)

LTE is more flexible than earlier GSM-evolved flavors, too: Where GSM’s
3G variants use 5 megahertz (MHz) channels, LTE can use a channel size
from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz; this lets it work in markets where spectrum is
scarce and sliced into tiny pieces, or broadly when there are wide
swaths of unused or reassigned frequencies. In short, the wider the
channel—everything else being equal—the higher the throughput.

Speeds are also boosted through MIMO (multiple input, multiple output),
just as in 802.11n Wi-Fi. Multiple antennas allow two separate
benefits: better reception, and multiple data streams on the same
spectrum.

LTE complications

This map, courtesy Wikipedia,
shows countries in varying states of LTE readiness. Those in red have
commercial service; dark blue countries have LTE networks planned and
deploying; light blue countries are investigating LTE, and grey
countries have no LTE service at all.

Unfortunately, in practice, LTE implementation gets sticky: There are 33 potential bands for LTE, based on a carrier’s local regulatory domain. In contrast, GSM has just 14 bands,
and only five of those are widely used. (In broad usage, a band is two
sets of paired frequencies, one devoted to upstream traffic and the
other committed to downstream. They can be a few MHz apart or hundreds
of MHz apart.)

And while LTE allows voice, no standard has yet been agreed upon;
different carriers could ultimately choose different approaches, leaving
it to handset makers to build multiple methods into a single phone,
though they’re trying to avoid that. In the meantime, in the U.S.,
Verizon and AT&T use the older CDMA and GSM networks for voice
calls, and LTE for data.

LTE in the United States

Of the four major U.S. carriers, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have LTE networks, with T-Mobile set to start supporting LTE
in the next year. But that doesn’t mean they’re set to play nice. We
said earlier that current LTE frequencies are divided up into 33
spectrum bands: With the exception of AT&T and T-Mobile, which share
frequencies in band 4, each of the major U.S. carriers has its own
band. Verizon uses band 13; Sprint has spectrum in band 26; and AT&T
holds band 17 in addition to some crossover in band 4.

In addition, smaller U.S. carriers, like C Spire, U.S. Cellular, and Clearwire, all have their own separate piece of the spectrum pie: C Spire and U.S. Cellular use band 12, while Clearwire uses band 41.

As such, for a manufacturer to support LTE networks in the United States alone,
it would need to build a receiver that could tune into seven different
LTE bands—let alone the various flavors of GSM-evolved or CDMA networks.

With the iPhone, Apple tried to cut through the current Gordian Knot by
releasing two separate models, the A1428 and A1429, which cover a
limited number of different frequencies depending on where they’re
activated. (Apple has kindly released a list of countries
that support its three iPhone 5 models.) Other companies have chosen to
restrict devices to certain frequencies, or to make numerous models of
the same phone.

Banded together

Other solutions are coming. Qualcomm made a regulatory filing in June
regarding a seven-band LTE chip, which could be in shipping devices
before the end of 2012 and could allow a future iPhone to be activated
in different fashions. Within a year or so, we should see
most-of-the-world phones, tablets, and other LTE mobile devices that
work on the majority of large-scale LTE networks.

That will be just in time for the next big thing: LTE-Advanced, the true
fulfillment of what was once called 4G networking, with rates that
could hit 1 Gbps in the best possible cases of wide channels and short
distances. By then, perhaps the chip, handset, and carrier worlds will
have converged to make it all work neatly together.